The Best of All Possible Worlds
by CharlesTheBold
Summary: After Grace complains about how the world works, God agrees to show her an alternative. Extensively revised February 19. Please Review.
1. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

_(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with JOAN OF ARCADIA. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it. This particular story was also influenced by IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and C.S. Lewis' OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, and I have no connection to those, either)_

_(Author's Note: This story is part of a series that takes place in the year after the show ended. A listing of the other stories is on my profile. The main events that have happened since May 2005 are _

_(1) Joan has let Grace, Luke, and Adam into her secret _

_(2) Luke has been promoted into the same grade as Joan, Grace, and Adam._

_(3) Grace and Luke have spent one night together _

_(Special note: this is an extensive revision of my original beginning, in which Grace's father fell dangerously ill. By a bizarre coincidence, my own father went into the hospital just after I posted Chapter 2, and everything became too personal. So I've decided to keep the Rabbi in good health, and hand Grace another crisis)_

**Chapter 1 Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?**

_(The chapter title is from T.S. Eliot's poem "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK") _

"You can't do this," I said.

"You've done it to yourself, Miss Polk," Vice-Principal Price said smugly. "By not showing up on the day of an important English test, you got a zero. Your teacher calculates that combined with other poor grades, you'll flunk the English course as a result. And if you don't have sufficient English credits, you can't graduate in May."

"But everything was crazy at the time! That was the week somebody blew up City Hall, and the police were circulating around the school because they thought a student was involved. Joan Girardi got to take her law test over."

"Miss Girardi was _granted_ permission to be absent that day, because the police required her services." It was of course Price who had done the granting. Power to help or doom a student must make him feel like G-d, not having met the real one. "Whereas you, if I understand properly, used your time off to go horseback riding."

I groaned. Fearful that the police were after me, and wanting an unexpected escape route, I had borrowed a hardy steed from Maggie Begh and ridden it cross-country to the next town, on a freezing January day. It had not been at all fun, and that stage of my flight it had actually occurred on a Saturday, not the test day. But try explaining any of that to Mr. Price.

"Of course all is not lost," said Mr. Price. "You can make up the English course during the summer, and at the end we will give you the diploma."

Great. Sitting on my butt in a schoolroom while everybody else was enjoying the crucial summer between high-school and the independent life of college. "And if I don't?"

"Well, one cannot get far these days without a high-school diploma. Not very far with one, for that matter."

I stomped out of the office. It was near the end of the school day Friday, so I didn't even bother going to the last class, which wasn't giving a test. I needed to think. And the more I thought about the problem, the worse it sounded.

Two or three years ago, it wouldn't have mattered. My attitude then was that high school was an ordeal designed for the torture of teenagers. But then I had met Luke Girardi, who taught me that learning can be a joy, particularly if it was a subject that one loved, as Luke loved science. And through Luke's cousins, a farming family named the Cavallos, I discovered a project in which genetically engineered grain was being tested as a possible solution to Third World famine, and realized that learning could solve issues that I cared deeply about. But now I was short the graduation credits, and I was going to look like a dunce.

Reputation was another thing that hadn't bothered me two years ago, when I had enjoyed being the Bad Girl. But since my mother's secret drinking had both stopped and come into the open, and I had gone through my bat mizvah, I realized that I cared what the community thought of me. My parents' peers admired academic achievement., and if one didn't achieve---?

At least there was one good thing about the timing. It was Friday, and on Fridays I got together with my best friends, Adam and the Girardis, to discuss divine revelations or anything else of interest to us. At least they would sympathize with my situation.

Come 5:00, I rang the doorbell at the Girardi house, and Luke answered the door. "Grace! How nice of you to stop by."

"We had an appointment, dude." I said, surprised.

"We did? Oh, that's right. Well, come in."

I came in and looked toward the broad living-room area, expecting to see Joan helping her mother with the beginnings of dinner. But nobody was there.

"Um, Mom took Adam and Joan shopping," Luke said sheepishly, realizing that I had an appointment with them as well

"Shopping for what? What could be more important than our sessions?" ..

"They're looking for a ring. Joan and Adam have decided to get married."

_"What?"_

"Apparently she proposed to Adam last Sunday, and kept it secret all week, but finally blurted it out yesterday."

_"She_ proposed to _him_? That's refreshing, even though the rest of the marriage idea is so retro. Is she pregnant?"

"No, she insists that she's still a virgin, and after two earlier cases where we didn't believe her, I'm inclined to accept her word for it this time."

"So when will the ceremony be?"

"June."

Under any other circumstances, I might have made a satirical remark about adhering too close to tradition. But the mention of the summer suddenly reminded me again of my meeting with Price. "Crap!"

Luke blinked. "There's something crappy about June?"

"For me there is." I poured out me story of the missed graduation and the dread possibility of summer school.

"That's not fair," Luke said indignantly. "I missed a couple of days, too, but since my teachers didn't give big tests then, I got away with it. Still, I don't see how I can help straighten out the situation. If it was a science teacher flunking you I might be able to talk to her, but English teachers have no reason to listen to me."

I hadn't even thought of talking to a teacher; to me teachers were The Enemy. "No, I don't expect you to do anything about it. Just offering tea and sympathy is OK." I had meant it literally, but uttering those last three words triggered a weird attack of déjà vu. I had once seen a controversial 50's movie called "Tea and Sympathy" on cable, and it ended with the central male character getting --- "There is one thing I'd like," I said.

"Yeah?"

"My 18th birthday is next month. Do you think that, in honor of the occasion we could---?" I left the end of the request unspoken. "After all, we did It on your birthday."

"Your parents wouldn't like it."

"They're not going to be in bed with us!" I said with annoyance.

"You know what I mean. I want them to consider me a suitable future husband for you, and I already have one strike against me, being a goy. If they think I'm obsessed with sex --"

"We're talking about an ex-alcoholic and a hypocritical rabbi! What right have they to judge you, particular when I'll be a legal adult at the time?"

"They're still your parents, Grace."

"Fine. Enjoy the celibate life." I made a further rude suggestion on the subject of sex that I'd rather not repeat here, and marched out the front door. A summer in school with no boyfriend; what else could go wrong?

When I got back to my house, there was a letter addressed to me in the mailbox. It was a rejection letter from my most recent job interview. That was infuriating, and not just because of the rejection itself. If I couldn't get a job, I had to stay with my parents even after I hit 18, which meant I sort of had to live on their terms. Or at least not let Luke spend a night in my bedroom in their house.

"G-d damn it!" I yelled, kicking the mailbox post.

"Is that an order, or a request?" asked an amused female voice behind me. I guessed who it was before even turning around.

My riding teacher Diana, who had turned out to be G-d in disguise. The deity appeared to Joan in a variety of forms, but usually chose the Cowgirl identity to deal with me. She never explained why, but probably it was simply because Joan was less suspicious of strangers than I was. I had a lot more important things to worry about than that.

"We need to talk,." I said.

"Of course. Much more productive than sending an inanimate mailbox to the nether regions. What do you want to talk about?"

"You can see for yourself." I took a deep breath. "My life is hell right now. I argue with Luke all the time, and nobody wants me to work with them -- but we've talked about all this before. And now this! My first summer as an adult, and I'm in remedial ed! Why do you let these things happen?"

"You know that I prefer not to interfere with the natural sequence of events.--"

"Don't give me that! You invented nature! Don't tell me that you couldn't have done a better job."

"I could, but free will--"

I heard this lecture before; that humans made their beds and had to lie in them. "You can throw 'free will' in the toilet for all I care."

"Oddly enough, I did once. A few weeks ago I told Luke about another world that I made. It's hard to express the difference in human language, but in that world I gave humans an extra drive to serve one another's good, at the expense of their free will. As a _midrash, _you could say that their version of Adam and Eve waited for me to teach them good and evil, instead of seizing that knowledge before they were ready for it."

"I wish I had been born there." I said angrily, implying that it was G-d's fault that my soul ended up in the wrong universe..

"No. Because if you were, you wouldn't have grown up to be you, Grace Polk. You'd be afraid to speak up for fear of hurting another's feelings, and you'd be a rebel with no real cause. Frankly, your struggles to do the right thing are more beautiful to me than the pre-programmed goodness of the people in the other world."

"I don't feel beautiful. I don't care about beautiful. That's a girl thing."

"No, it's a G-d thing. Someday, you'll see all of this in perspective." She walked off with her characteristic wave, leaving me still fuming at my lot.

TBC


	2. The Ride Into Another World

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

**Chapter 2 The Ride Into Another World**

"Hello?"

"Hullo," echoed the voice on the other end of the line. "This is Maggie Begh."

Morgiana Begh was a girl from Turkey. Her father, a respected Muslim scholar, had been invited to a nearby university to lecture on Islamic culture, and Maggie had come to America with him. One day in school I tried to rescue her from some racist bullies, and we had become friends. The unusual bond between a Muslim and a Jewish girl had lasted until January, and when it fell apart it was for reasons that had nothing to do with religion.

Maggie's family bred horses on a farm outside Arcadia, carrying on an old tradition in Turkey, and she had lent me one on the day that I was anxious to outrun the police. That part of the plan worked out, but if it had gone sour it could have jeopardized a number of things, from a valuable steed to the Beghs' visa to live in the U.S. When the crisis was over and our parents sized up the situation, I got grounded and Maggie got a whipping.

The disparity in punishments was simply due to the cultural difference between an American dad and a semi-traditional Turkish "baba", but Maggie could scarcely be blamed for thinking that she got the raw end of the deal (and though I was afraid to ask exactly what the whipping consisted of, I bet her rear end was pretty raw). She didn't blame her father, she blamed me for getting her into trouble, and our friendship cooled. So why was she calling now, the Saturday evening after my argument with Price?

She explained herself. "I met Luke Girardi this afternoon, when we were both visiting Adam and admiring his new picture. He told me your story. As you Americans say, it is sucking."

It wasn't exactly what Americans said, but I could appreciate the sentiment. "Thank you."

"I know of no way to help you, but perhaps I can cheer you up. Would you like to go riding tomorrow?"

I thought about that. I had learnt to ride horses this past summer, from Cowgirl G-d, who predicted that the skill might make the difference between life and death someday. That prediction apparently came to pass when I searched for a missing and injured Bonnie McLean on horseback in December. Riding for fun always bothered me a bit; it seemed that I was enjoying myself at the expense of a helpless horse.

But of course the horses weren't the important part of Maggie's invitation. Mending a broken friendship was. What had changed her mind? I didn't know. Maybe simply loneliness. It was probably difficult for a Muslim girl to make new friendships in the middle of a long-drawn-out war in which the papers were always talking about "Muslim extremists".

"Okay."

------------------

After parking her car in front of their villa, Maggie took me directly to the stables to the side of the house. Nothing was said about my talking to her father. I supposed that he was still sore at me and was dramatizing it, not by direct confrontation, but by refusing to play the host. The only real sign of friction was the Maggie picked out my horse herself from the lot rather than giving me a choice as on previous occasions. It was a good horse, quite sufficient for an amateur high school girl, but it clearly wasn't the cream of the crop. Obviously "Baba" had instructed her not to trust me with one of their best. I told myself not to take offense; after all there was a well-known proverb about gift horses.

We walked them out of the stable and got up our mounts. Whatever had been done to Maggie's rear didn't seem to be bothering her now as she settled comfortably into her saddle and urged her horse into a trot. I followed suit, staying a few paces behind her steed, silently acknowledging that she was the mistress here.

"Joan said she might come by the stables next week," commented Maggie.

"Really? I thought she was terrified of horses, ever since her Lyme Disease," I said.

"That is the idea.. She KNOWS it is a phobia, but cannot tell her emotions that. We can control conditions. Joan will try to get used to the proximity of a horse, stepping as closely and as slowly as she needs "

"It's good of her to try," I said. The pleasant discussion of a mutual friend overcome the social awkwardness; I felt that Maggie and I really were friends again, and that I could enjoy the ride for its own sake. And, indeed, few things could be better contrived to get my mind off of summer school than the current ride across Maggie's land. Instead of being trapped inside a wooden desk, I was sitting aside a beautiful living animal. Instead of staring at four walls, I could see for nearly a hundred yards in any direction, across fields to forest or farmhouse or distant cityscape. I had almost forgotten---

Something spooked my horse.

The quadruped reared up on its two hind feet. I had a horrified vision of being thrown off and crippled for life like Christopher Reeves, but by the time I had actually formulated the fear the horse had come back down on its forelegs, and I was still on is back. It was still stomping the ground and shaking me giddily. I was crouched over its neck -- Luke told me later that that instinctive position had kept my center of gravity above my mount's and preserved my balance.-- so I patted its neck with my right hand while firmly gripping the reins with the left. Only after I had calmed the animal did I feel safe looking around to see what actually happened.

Maggie was gone. So, for that matter, was her horse.

So was her farm. A minute ago I had been riding by a few trees, planted on either side of the bridle path. Now I saw tight, unmanaged growth of various trees and other plants on both sides of the road. The background faint scent of horse manure at the farm was replaced by a variety of smells from the forest. The dirt road was still there but much more uneven than the Begh's carefully designed bridle path.

"Maggie?!"

"She's not here," said a familiar voice behind me. I could swear I had looked that direction a few seconds ago. I yanked on my reins to make my horse turn around, heedless of the danger of spooking it again. I found myself looking at Cowgirl G-d, seated on a splendid steed of Her own. Somehow She seemed more awe-inspiring than usual, as if the divine power was leaking though the usual human-stranger façade. Even Her blue jeans somehow struck me as holy.

"Where's here?" I demanded.

"It's difficult to describe in human terms. Let's just say that I've brought you to the universe I told you about two days ago, where I let human minds evolve closer to the ideal. Call it Edenworld, if you like. Geographically you're still outside Arcadia, Maryland, but there is no Arcadia here, and no Maryland."

I tried to grasp all that. "Why?"

"You said you wished that you had been born here. That's impossible, but I could at least bring you here for a visit. Sorry about spooking your horse -- she sensed the change right away, of course -- but I watched over you to ensure that you were not injured."

"Um, yeah, thanks for granted my wishes and all that. But I've got to get back to the farm, before the Beghs think that I've stolen another horse."

"No, it's not like that. Time is frozen in your world until you return back. That's the only way that I could bring you here without violating conservation of mass. Positive mass change over zero time -- well, ask Luke about quantum tolerances sometime. You'll have more fun hearing it from him than Me. Here, I feel freer to work miracles, so I just added an extra 600 kilograms for you and your horse."

"Um, what do I do?" I felt a little annoyance over being kicked out of one universe into another one, but I felt a growing sense of adventure that was greater. I decided not to complain, even though complaining about things was usually fun.

"Just explore whatever interests you.. No human here will be a threat to you, and I will protect you from natural dangers if necessary. And I will work one extra miracle. Languages here have evolved quite independently from your world, but to avoid communication problems, I will arrange for you to hear everyone as if they were speaking English, and translate your utterances into their tongue. Bear in mind that there will still be concepts in their conversation that will be alien to you, and vice versa. Listen and learn." She waved her hand in the usual odd gesture. "Shalom"

"Shalom."

And I was left alone, in a brave new world.

TBC


	3. First Contact

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

**Chapter 3 First Contact**

Within minutes of G-d's disappearance, I heard human voices in the distance. I could not see them, there was a curve in the road and the thick vegetation blocked my view beyond that point. Nor could I make out words yet. But the mere sound triggered a rush of unusual thoughts in my mind.

My usual tendency was to be a gadfly, criticizing what I saw around me, and making little attempt to conform to conventional behavior. In French class I had even learned a phrase for my way of life: _épater les bourgeois_. But here there were no Arcadian _bourgeois_, but a completely different breed of human, meeting my type for the first time. G-d had made me a representative for the human race, and regardless of what I thought of most humans I had met, I felt that I must represent the human race _well_. Be polite, avoid snarkiness, in short reign in my usual instincts, even if it meant gritting my teeth..

It might be difficult to produce a good impression. According to G-d, these people had evolved further than we had; in a sense they were more "civilized". What sort of things could they have accomplished that humans hadn't? I thought back to conversations with Luke, in which he outlined technological marvels.which he and Friedmann had dug out of science-fiction stories. Vehicles suspending them in the air; projecting 3D images of themselves; clothing themselves in energy. And suddenly I felt self-conscious, holding the reins of a horse, a form of transportation from the nineteenth century and earlier.. Would the Edenworlders understand that horses were just there for fun, that my humans had reached the moon and interpreted the genome?

An oxcart filled with old sacks came around the corner.

I was so startled by the anti-climax that I simply stared for a minute. It was a pretty cart, painted a bright shade of yellow and with a green canopy stretched over its length, but there was nothing hi-tech about it. There were two animals pulling it that looked like oxen. I knew that an ox was a castrated bull and the idea made me feel queasy; in my farm work the only draft animals I had dealt with were horses, and they were never gelded..

There were two people sitting in the driver seat, a young man and woman. They got out of the cart when they saw me and walked past their draft animals, either as a greeting ritual or to get a better look at me.

"Happiness unto you," said the young man. He was a pale young man with bushy brown hair; in fact he looked disconcertingly like Friedmann. He was wrapped in a blue piece of cloth.

The greeting sounded formal, very close to _Shalom alekhem, _so I echoed it. "And the same to you both."

The woman bowed slightly. She was likewise wrapped up, in green but otherwise differing little from her partner's robe. I noticed that the cloth was quite loose in the chest area, making no attempt to accentuate her breasts. Apparently the Edenworlders had gotten beyond the "naked but not ashamed" stage, and given how cold Maryland could be in March, that wasn't surprising. She was darker than Colin, but not African-American. I couldn't place the ethnic group at the moment, and it didn't really matter. "I am Sinehava, and my companion is named Colin."

I mimicked the bow. "I'm Grace."

The exchange of names seemed to break the ice, and Sinehava stared at my mount with frank curiosity. "That's the most impressive horse I've ever seen."

There was no trace of envy or flattery in the remark. She was making a compliment and a sincere one. I turned and examined the animal with some surprise. Only a couple of hours earlier I had reflected how average this horse was compared to Maggie's prized specimens.

Then I remembered what Jean Cavallo had once told me: that the modern horse was a comparatively recent invention, bred in the Middle Ages by European knights and Muslim warriors to carry heavily armored riders. In earlier times they may have been more like ponies. And if there were no warriors here to do the breeding, would they have stayed in the pony stage? "Thank you."

"It looks like it could carry you over quite a distance on its back," speculated Sinehava.

I thought fast. This pair were not the superhumans that I had been expecting, but they were nice to the point of naivete. Apparently it had been Cowgirl G-d's intention that I hook up with this pair; otherwise, why plop me right in their path? But people who used oxcarts and stood in awe of ordinary horses were unlikely to understand travel across other dimensions -- I didn't understand it myself. I had to invent a cover story. "Um, yes. Unfortunately it carried me over quite a distance in the wrong direction. I'm lost. Could you help me--?"

"We don't know all the paths," said Colin, "but this road will take us to the City on the Bay."

I knew nothing about the City, but it sounded like a logical destination. "That'll do."

"Travel with us, then," urged Sinehava.

That was weird. No "who the hell are you?" or "how could you be so stupid as to get lost in the country?" or "how do we know you won't catch us off guard and rob us?" Sinehava and Colin simply assumed that if you came across a stranger in their world, the stranger was automatically trustworthy.

So I hoisted myself back into the saddle and started riding in front of my new friends. The logistics were awkward. I spent half the time twisting around to talk to Sinehava and Colin, and the other half looking ahead to make sure the road was safe and clear of anything that might spook my horse again. But after a few miles the path widened to the point that I was able to lead the animal between the cart and the trees. After that point I could ride behind the cart. Sinehava climbed back over the sacks and sat on the back on the wagon so that she could chat with me.

"You're from Europe, aren't you?" asked Sinehava.

"Yes," I lied, realizing that declaring myself a foreigner might be useful in explaining away any faux pas that I might make. "What made you guess that?"

She giggled. "You're pale, like Colin. His parents are from Europe. Most people around here have skin like mine."

Racial characteristics were a very risky topic in my experience, so I changed the subject. "Where are you from?"

"A village called Irrvatec, a few day's travel west of here, where it's hillier."

Towards the Appalachians, apparently. "What's it like?"

Sinehava seemed to have trouble thinking of interesting things to say about it. Not too surprising; I'd be hard put to make Arcadia sound like a fascinating city myself. Irrvatec had a couple of hundred inhabitants. When Sinehava mentioned that visitors were rare and that most of the villagers were intricately related by marriage, I deduced that the village must be rather isolated from the outside world, and economically self-sufficient. Sinehava confirmed that the village made its own utensils and grew its own food; Sinehava herself worked in the fields..

Colin had paid the village a visit about a month ago, in his oxcart. He was, Sinehava said a traveler who liked to explore the area, which was something rare and fascinating in her experience. He told the villagers that a certain strain of crops that they had bred was unique and that other villages might be interested in growing it themselves. The villagers promptly gave him several free sacks of grain to distribute around the area, and Sinehava agreed to come along to teach other villages how to plant it properly. No talk about monopolizing a valuable commodity, no jokes about travelling salesmen running off with local girls. The villagers had lucked out, and were sharing its good fortune. I was trying to figure out a tactful way of asking whether Sinehava and Colin were lovers, when Colin himself stopped the oxcart.

"Hey! There's a stream to the left. We must've been going parallel to it for some time, with the trees blocking the view."

Sinehava pointed out the plants growing between the stream and the path. "Can the animals graze there?"

Colin looked at the plants, with the eye of somebody accustomed to living off the territory. "Sure."

"Why don't we camp here for the night, then?"

Colin looked up at the sun. "We have at least another hour of daylight."

That was a neat trick, I thought. Even Luke, with his familiarity with both the heavenly bodies and the physics of time, probably couldn't tell time by simply looking at the sky.

"Well, what's the hurry?" asked Sinehava.

Colin seemed to agree that there was no hurry, but I was about to squirm. As if restraining my horse to the pace of an oxcart wasn't slow enough, Sinehava wanted to waste another hour of daylight.

"I'm going to ride ahead and explore the road a bit," I said. "I'll be back by sundown."

They nodded blandly, as if to say they saw no point in my suggestion, but saw no harm in it either. But I had several reasons for wanting to ride ahead. First was sheer impatience with the pace of the journey; even my horse seemed frustrated at being stuck behind the cart for hours. Secondly, I had a need to relieve myself, and I didn't know a polite way to say that to my companions. If Adam and Eve ever needed to pee in the Garden of Eden, the Torah certainly didn't mention it. Thirdly, I needed to think through the situation without constantly being on my guard against being caught by the other two in a white lie.

About a mile ahead I found a light patch of woods where I could do my thing. After that, I leaned against a tree about twenty yards away and meditated.

Sinehava and Colin were not the superbeings I had expected, and yet they were no dummies. Colin could tell time by looking at the sky and judge the suitability of plants for grazing. Sinehava could teach people how to plant a new type of grain. What they lacked was a _spark_. Born into a perfect world, they enjoyed its bounty, and even thought of a few improvements, but they had no drive to make it measurably better. Why invent a car, or even breed a better horse, if oxen would fill the bill? Luke had once told me that clocks were the first modern machines, but why invent them when the sky told you what you needed to know about the time of day? Why map out territory when few people felt the need to go anywhere? It all made sense, but to a twenty-first-century girl, it was intensely boring.

Maybe talking to Colin would be better. He did have a drive of sorts, though he expressed it in exploration instead of in inventions. Or maybe this City on the Bay would be more interesting, if we ever got there. Maybe G-d had deliberately dropped me in a backward region so that I could get my bearings. Being dropped directly into the city might have given me culture shock.

Sun setting. Mindful that there were no artificial sources of light around -- I certainly hadn't brought any from Arcadia -- I thought I had better get back to camp. If there was one thing that Sinehava and Colin were expert in, it would be how to camp outdoors for a night.

TBC


	4. Going to the Big City

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

_(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I know that a lot of readers think it odd of me to base a science-fiction story in the Joaniverse, but I thought that once you have "God" as a character almost anything can happen. I'm still adhering to the rules that the missions are designed to have "good ripples" and teach the characters a lesson, and that there are no explicit miracles in the "real world". This story is the only time I'm going to try something like this)_

**Chapter 4 Going to the Big City**

I'm not going to describe the journey to the City on the Bay in detail. It was very boring, and it would be likely to bore anybody reading about it, so I'll just hit the high spots.

We did camp out together that night: we simply unloaded a few sacks of grain from the wagon and lay down in the vacated space, with Sinehava in the middle. As an only child I wasn't used to sharing sleeping arrangements, but I was tired enough to fall asleep quickly anyway. The next morning, while Colin was cooking a rudimentary breakfast, I tried to find out from Sinehava exactly what her relationship was with Colin. She just answered that Colin was "pledged" to a girl in the City and it would be dishonorable for Sinehava and Colin to get together. That, apparently, was enough to put a damper on things, to assure Sinehava that she could spend the night lying at Colin's side.. If only Adam had behaved that way when Bonnie tried to seduce him, we'd have been saved several months of awkwardness.

While gathering the animals together for the next day's journey, I made a quick, secret glance at the ox's anatomy. It hadn't been castrated after all. It was not an ox but a bull; somehow the Edenworlders had managed to tame a notoriously bad-tempered creature, without performing a cruel mutilation. My opinion of them went up a lot after that.

The next day Sinehava drove the cattle while Colin sat on the back of the cart, talking to me. I finally had an excuse to mention advancing technology.

"Colin, Sinehava says that you like to travel. But don't you think it would be more fun if you could go faster, reach more places.

"I see what you mean," said Colin. "If I had a team of horses like your mount -- do you know where I could find some, and whether they could spare a few?"

"Um, I'm afraid not," I said, startled by the request. My horse was here only because G-d had reasoned that I needed it. She could just as easily teleported a whole herd over, but apparently that wasn't the Divine Plan. "I had something else in mind; automobiles."

"What are the automobiles?"

Eagerly I tried to explain -- but I soon found that the more curious Colin got, the less equipped I was to answer the questions. I explained that the key component was an internal combustion engine, but I had no idea how it worked, except that it burnt gasoline. Asked about gasoline, I barely remembered (from AP Chemistry under Ms. Lischak two years ago) that they were composed of something called hydrocarbons, which meant little to me and nothing to Colin. I said gasoline derived from oil and that oil could be found in Texas; I had to explain where Texas was, and Colin clearly found it an impossible distance away. I explained that automobiles worked better given a paved surface. Colin understood pavements -- apparently they had them in Cities -- but paving over miles of country road struck him as another impossibility.

----

After that I gave up on trying to teach Colin, and instead tried to learn some background, like the history of this world. Turns out that there wasn't much history. Mr. Driesbach in school once quoted an English guy named Carlyle who said that most history books involve suffering and that the happiest people were those who didn't get mentioned in history books. Apparently the Edenworlders were happy.

It was like pulling teeth, but gradually I built up a picture of the world. The whole world was divided into little self-sufficient communities that had little reason, and little drive, to contact each other. The exception happened when some locality discovered something new, something that improved the standard of living. Then the beneficiaries felt an obligation to spread the good news throughout the world -- but when they did so they had travel on cow paths and ships built by amateurs. Nobody had the foresight to build a transportation system.

Europe sent sea-faring technology to the Americas. The Native Americans sent back chocolate, and potatoes. The Europeans sent horses (small ones, of course) back to the Americans. The Natives sent useful herbs like quinine.

There had been no massive European colonization of the Americas. Native Americans like Sinehava still dominated the colonists, and when they saw a pale face like mine or Colin's, they automatically got classified as "from Europe".

No Indian wars. No European persecutions driving away religious minorities like my ancestors across the ocean. There were things to admire in this world's history. But could I introduce a change that wouldn't ruin the good features.of the society? And was it possible that G-d had brought me here for exactly that reason? After all, she did work in mysterious ways.

---

"There it is" cried Colin proudly.

I looked. From my point of view I was standing in northern Baltimore looking south toward the bay, but in fact I was still standing on a rural road, and what I saw looked nothing like Baltimore. What I saw were odd-looking domes popping out through the trees, each a separate color. Compared to what I had seen on the oxcart it was impressive, but far smaller than "my" Baltimore.

I had learned not to ask dumb questions that any Edenworlder would be expected to know. I would find out about the domes soon enough.

We continued on the road. The City on the Bay, it turned out, had no suburbs. One minute we were riding on the crude dirt road, then we saw a sort of ornamental arch over the road, beyond which the road was behaved. There was a large wooden building to my left, crude by twenty-first century standards but the largest that I had seen so far in the Edenworld.

Colin halted the bulls on the rural side of the arch, as if expecting something to happen. Something did. A man came out of the building an examined the party, not the three of us, but the two bulls and my horse. "You'll have to leave the animals here."

"What?" cried Sinehava.

"It's all right," Colin assured her. "There's no room for large animals on the city paths. And they don't want to contend with their droppings, either." He turned to the man. "Fine, but I have some valuable sacks of grain here, and we can't carry all of them ourselves."

"I will raise up a flag for volunteers," the man said, and that seemed to satisfy Colin.

I wasn't too pleased. The horse I had ridden all this time wasn't really mine, it was the Beghs', and I was being asked to turn it over to a stranger. I had to rely on G-d's assurance that everybody here was inherently trustworthy, and assume that I'd get it back..

"How do we get around without our draft animals?" asked Sinehava as we started walking on the pavement. "Will we have to walk everywhere?"

"No," said Colin. "Look."

I followed his pointing finger and saw a little rowboat, brightly colored like the oxcart, tethered on the side of a little stream. The stream looked suspiciously straight, and I guessed that it was an artificial canal, dug by the City dwellers and filled with water from the Patapsco River, or whatever it was called here. A clever idea for getting through the city.

The three of us got in the boat (nobody asked us for rent or accused us of stealing it) and Colin skillfully deployed the oars to drive the boat south. We were approaching the domes, which turned out to be the roofs of large circular buildings. Sinehava was as curious about them as I was, so Colin explained. Each of them was a "Communal" building that supplied some function to the city, symbolized its color. The mildly yellow domes were for food storage, the grayish building was the "Guest House", the light blue building was "The Bath." Surrounding each of the Communal buildings were much smaller one-story structures that I hadn't seen from the distance -- houses I presumed. They were all connected by paved paths or canals, lined by trees or flowers.

It was all very pretty, I thought, but what really struck me was not so much the presence of beauty but the absence of ugliness. No slums that I could see. No smokestacks belching out pollution. It was a picture-postcard city, or a big theme park.

Except that it wasn't a theme park where you had to pay to enjoy artificial sights. This was an honest-to-G-d City, people lived here, and I was anxious to meet the sort of people who would create a beautiful dwelling-place like this.

TBC


	5. Edenworld Hospitality

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

**Chapter 5 Edenworld Hospitality**

We went down a path of houses. Not row houses as I had seen in Baltimore, but not fancy like my house in Arcadia or the Girardi's. They seemed to be constructed of large painted bricks. Windows seemed to be the absence of bricks: no glass, though some had curtains on the inside. I supposed that houses in ancient Sumeria were like that.

Colin stopped at one house, a light green color. I don't know how he recognized it, since there were other green residences on the path, but of course he could make out fine distinctions in the houses, while it was all novel to me. He knocked.

A girl answered the door. She was olive-complexioned; I couldn't figure out her ethnic background, but it didn't matter here anyway. She promptly gave Colin a hug and kiss. As making-out went it was rather tame, but of course they were in public. This must be the girl he was "pledged" to.

"Come in," she said, addressing all of us, before we had even exchanged names.

The door let into an unlighted hallway with four curtained "doorways", two to a side. She took the first to the right. A few cushions were scattered around the floor, the only furniture, and we were obviously intended to sit on them. The only light came from the windows, through which the sun shone. Don't condescend, I told myself, this is as comfortable as it needs to be.

Instead of introducing us directly, Colin gave a long and, to me, boring account of his journey in his oxcart. Sinehava, he explained, had been sent by her village to instruct the outside world in how to plant their new strain of grain. When it came time to explain me he got a little flustered: my original story of being separated from a party had obviously not held up, but both he and Sinehava had been too polite to ask for another account. And yet he was careful not to put me on the spot either. As far as the hostess was concerned, I was just another travelling companion.

"I am Joma," said our hostess. "I do carpentry work around the City. In fact, I've promised to help fix some storm damage before nightfall. But feel free to use the house. You can even use the bath; I know it's hard to clean up on those journeys outside the City." It sounded like the lovely Spanish greeting, _mi casa es tu casa_, and even more literally meant.

"I've had experience repairing the cart," Colin said. "I can help you with the storm damage."

"Thank you."

"And Grace and I will take you up on the offer of a bath," said Sinehava, unembarrassed.

"Very well. Just one warning: I only have enough water for one tubfill. You'll have to share."

Yikes. As an only child I had never had to share with brothers or sisters. The girl I knew best outside the family was Joan, and I had certainly never taken a bath with her, or even seen her entirely naked. More importantly, nobody outside the family had seen me that way; there were ways of dodging the embarrassment in the Arcadia High locker room.

"Um, I'll pass," I said hastily. "I need to see about lodgings for the night."

"Go to the Guest Dome," Joma advised.

"Right," Colin said. "Sinehava and I will probably go there later."

For the first time, Joma looked puzzled. Had she expected Colin to spend the night at her house, perhaps even in her bed? And that was part of a bigger question: what did the Edenworlders do about sex?

As I walked to the "guest" dome I thought of some theological commentaries that I had read about when sex began. (No, I don't usually go about reading theological commentaries, but discussions of sex could be fun, even if the rabbis didn't intend it that way. That was one of the few things I had learned from Friedmann. He compared it to looking at naked women in old issues of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC). Some thought that Adam and Even first Did It after eating the forbidden fruit, indeed that the Forbidden Fruit might be a symbol of sex. Others argued that men and women had apparently been created with sexual equipment, so they must have been intended to use it.

Obviously the Edenworlders had sex without the forbidden fruit, since the world had been peopled. And if you just interpreted Eden as an allegory and thought of the situation from the evolutionary point of view, each of humanity's ancestors had obviously had sex; thus what made them ancestors. Presumably humanity didn't stop after G-d had intervened and improved them.

But what were the rules? Obviously the traditional wedding ceremony with the canopy and the breaking of the wineglass was a late development, but the Torah used wifely imagery even when discussing Eve. So were the Edenworlders, so perfect in everything else, perfect husbands and wives? Certainly they seemed to have less children than in my world. The City on the Bay didn't seem to be much larger than Arcadia, which was a small town as American cities went, yet everybody here seemed to consider it a major metropolis.

----

The interior of the Guest Dome was a lot more prosaic than I expected. Given an impressive dome, I had expected a large open area underneath, like at the Rotunda in the Capitol in Washington. Instead it was a big network of candle-lit corridors, two of them crisscrossing and the others concentric. The manager or landlady or whatever asked if I wanted a private or shared area. I asked for private; privacy had been very difficult to come by during my entire stay. "Private" turned out to be a curtained-off niche with a pallet and a candle. I would have to find a toilet somewhere. I was exasperated, and had to admit that for all my rebellious instincts I was a spoiled girl of the twentieth-first century who expected certain amenities.

My opinion of the place went up when the manager brought a dish of bread and fruit. They were delicious; up to now I had been subsisting on Colin's travelling fare, which was days old and cooked over a crude campfire. Only now did I realize that something was missing. "Um, how do I pay you?"

"Pay?" she said blankly.

"In exchange for the food. And the, um, lodging."

"The City provides them for all visitors."

"Don't the visitors have to give anything back to the city?"

"Everybody's expected to help keep the city functioning."

"Oh, I get it. Exchange of favors. I scratch your back, you scratch mine."

She looked scared. "I do not want my back scratched. If you require some such service, I would advise the bath-house--"

"All right. But I'm new here. How do I find out who needs help?"

From her point of view, I was finally asking reasonable questions. "If you have particular skills, seek out the appropriate guild. Otherwise, look for a flag. Institutions that require aid will fly one."

I had heard the man at the City limits talk about a flag, and that gave me an idea. But it would have to wait until tomorrow. Meanwhile I lay down on the pallet and tried to sort out my impressions of this weird universe.

I was about to fall asleep when I heard Sinehava's voice outside the curtain. "Grace?"

I pulled aside the curtain. "Yeah?"

She was practically bubbling. "Great news. Colin talked to Joma while they were working on the damage, and they agreed to release each other from their pledge. She's found a local boy she likes, anyway, and with Colin away so often--"

"Right. So you and Colin--"

"Tonight. We'll ask the guest-house for a room for couples."

It was all that easy? Get released from a "pledge", take up with a new girl that very night?. It all seemed very hedonistic, and not what I had expected from the Edenworlders. But I suppose that I was looking at it from the wrong point of view. Being programmed to the right thing all the time, the Edenworlders had little notion of guilt, or crises of conscience. Colin and Sinehava had respected the "pledge"; once that was taken care of, why not do what they liked?

I wished that Luke felt that way.

---

The next morning, after a delicious breakfast, I headed for the City limits. Everybody was expected to do something for the City, and although the whole thing seemed to be an honors system with nobody checking up on you, I felt that I should go along with it. And I knew of a task that I had experience with, and that very few Citydwellers would want to do

I knocked at the door of the man who had taken my horse and Colin's bulls, and presumably other animals from other visitors. When he answered, I asked:

"Hi. Need any help mucking out?


	6. The Mad Woman

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

**Chapter 6 The Mad Woman**

"Nice job," said the animal keeper.

"Yeah, thanks," I mumbled. Being told that I was good at shoveling crap was not a distinction I particularly relished. "Um, how can I clean up?"

"There's a washbasin in that room there. For a complete bath, you'll have to visit the bath-house. It--"

"I know where it is." I had to avoid cultural misunderstanding. To an American "bath-house" sounded kinky, but in a more primitive society without extensive plumbing, it was a useful institution, a place where people without individual facilities could go to get clean, and avoid disease.

I walked down the path, following the canal we had taken yesterday. One thing I noticed that I had missed yesterday was an odd absence of directional signs. Visitors to the city were comparatively rare, and the locals knew where everything was. Fortunately I remembered the water motif on the high dome; that was visible from the City's edge and I just needed to keep heading in that direction.

Close up, I saw that building was constructed as a cylinder, with the dome as the roof. There was only one door, prettily painted as if it were the entry into some underwater cave. Inside was another wall; the two seemed concentric, with a curving corridor running between the two.

But immediately inside the door was a desk with a woman to talk to visitors. Receptionists, apparently, existed in any universe. "Do you need a service?" she asked.

"I need a bath."

She sniffed. "Right." She pointed to the left. "Women that way, men the other way. Here's a towel and soap. Go in the blue door." No mention of paying money of course. This was part of the City's intricate network of exchanged generosities. I clean the stables, they give me a free bath.

I circled around until I found the blue door, and opened it.

About half a dozen women were skinny-dipping in a swimming pool.

I shut the door in a hurry. Yeah, I knew it was all innocent, but all the same I also knew that I wouldn't have the nerve to take my clothes off surrounded by a bunch of strangers. Oddly enough, the question had sort of come up recently. Adam wanted to paint a mythological picture, including the goddess Aphrodite, and had tried to find a girl willing to pose in the nude. He hadn't gotten around to asking me, thank G-d, but I had already thought through what my answer would be.

But where else could I--? Then I remembered that Colin's former girlfriend Joma had a bathtub. It would be rather embarrassing to ask to borrow on one day's acquaintance, but all the alternatives were embarrassing too..

If this was what it took to get clean in Paradise, I'd hate to find out what Hell was like.

---

I knocked at Joma's door, and heard a voice within. "Yes?"

"This is Grace. I know this sounds odd, but may I use your bathtab?"

A long pause, but finally Joma called out: "Sure. Come in."

I waited for her to unlock the door, then wised up. Joma didn't lock her door; she didn't even PUT a lock on her door. I opened it and walked in. Feeling that I should at least thank her face-to-face, I looked in each room, and finally find her sitting up in bed.

Colin was in bed beside her. I yelled "What the f----?"

Colin -- partly clothed, to my relief -- got out and walked up to me. "What's wrong?"

What was wrong? Less than twelve hours after consummating his relationship with Sinehava, claiming that he had been released from his pledge, here he was in bed with his old girl.

I slugged him.

I don't know what got into me. Part of it was rage at how Sinehava had been betrayed, mixed up with old feelings about Adam and Bonnie and their treatment of Joan. Part of it was outrage on being taken in -- after days and days in which I had been forced to admire Colin's way of life, he had been exposed as just one more jerk unable to control his lusts.

Part of it was sheer release of inhibition, after having to suppress my natural impulses for several days. Part of it was a feeling of unreality -- I was in a dreamworld, and nothing I did here really mattered. So I slugged him again.

Joma was out of bed and trying to tug me away from her lover. I kicked backward and hit her knee, which must have been painful. "Get out of my way, _bitch_!"

The bitch got out.

Colin was trying to hit me back. Looking back on it, I realized that his attempts were very feeble, that he had never resorted to violence before. At the time it created the illusion that I was really in a fight. So I slugged him another time.

I don't know how long the violence lasted. What stopped it was two pairs of female arms pulling me back.

"Let him alone!" shouted Joma's voice..

"You're out of your head," I heard Sinehava yell. Joma had apparently called her own rival for help. "Stop!"

I spun around and glared at Sinehava. "You're the injured party here. I found Colin and Joma in bed."

"So what? We agreed to share him."

"_Share_ him?"

"Look! His nose is bleeding!" cried Joma, who had apparently never seen the phenomenon before. My own nose had gotten broken by a bully last fall. She rushed to his side.

"Are you all right, Colin?" asked Sinehava, rushing to his other side.

This was insane. Two girls who ought to be engaged in the ultimate catfight were cooing over their "shared" boyfriend. I leaned against the bedroom wall, feeling awful.

_"Lemme out of here!"_


	7. Homecoming

**THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS**

**Chapter 7 Homecoming**

The girls and the beaten-up boy vanished, and I found myself in different circumstances. I was in a pasture, and before me Cowgirl G-d was sitting on a splendid steed. For once a horse rider appeared me not in the twenty-first way, as a farm worker or the follower of a hobby, but as a symbol of power. I remembered from Hebrew school that the Hebrew _markaba_, literally a horse-drawn chariot, could also be translated as throne, even the throne of G-d.

Behind .Cowgirl G-d I could see herds of horses grazing in the distance. A pretty sight, but I wasn't in the mood.

Luke had told me that when he had two visions of heaven, they were both colored by the form G-d had taken for the occasion. Little Girl G-d conjured a perfect playground, Cute Boy G-d the ideal teenager's room. So if I saw Cowgirl G-d on a huge horse farm, that wasn't surprising, and I didn't bother to ask about it.

"I suppose that you want to punish me for beating a guy up."

"No, Grace. You will punish yourself as you think back on what happened. And at least part of your violent action were the effects of animal passions that you possessed and the Edenworlders didn't -- that was one of the points I wanted to make."

"OK." I tried to thrust the guilt to the back of my mind. "Explain something else to me, then. It's good for Colin to make love to both Sinehava and Joma? Polygamy, like with the patriarchs in Genesis?"

"That's looking at it the wrong way, Grace. What was good was honesty and generosity. Faced with one of the most awkward of human situations, a love triangle, each of the three were honest about their desires, and sought a solution that didn't hurt any of the others."

"Besides, everybody got laid. They are all so _nice_," I snarled, putting a huge amount of nasty irony in that word..

"They were _made_ "nice", Grace. The people in your universe, I gave more free will, but I also tried to create institutions and rules to guide their behavior, like the institution of marriage."

"So what was point of this voyage to another world?"

"You tell me, Grace."

I thought very long on the question. "That we have the power to choose between the good and evil, and that I should enjoy the freedom, even though it sometimes comes back to bite me. And that if I want to be good, I have a world of examples to model my behavior on. But some of it won't work. If I just trust everybody that comes along, as Colin and Sinehava did, I'm going to get ripped off a lot."

"Use your judgement, Grace. That's part of the Choice. But now, it's time to send you home. I'll transport your horse and its saddle back to the Beghs' farm exactly as they left, so your friends won't ask awkward questions. By the same token, I'll do a purification blessing on you."

"To purge away my sins?"

"No, to clean you up. You traveled horseback for a week without a bath, then topped it off by shoveling dung out of a barn. To put it bluntly, you stink."

_ZZZZAP._

-----

I was back at the Begh farm, in the saddle, following Maggie and her horse. Suddenly she reined in her animal and twisted around. "Are you OK? You seem awfully quiet."

I had to suppress a huge laugh. From my point of view, the past two hours alone had included beating up a guy, and a vision of G-d. But all that had happened in another world, to which Maggie had no access.

"Yeah. Got a lot to think about." Let her think that I was still worried about summer school.

My cell phone rang. Relieved at the interruption, and delighted at finally getting back in touch with 21st century technology, I fished it out of my jacket. "Hello?"

"Gracie?" My mom's voice. I hated being called Gracie, but compared to everything else that had happened recently, that was minor. "Where are you?"

"At Maggie's farm, on one of her horses."

"Well, I hate to spoil your fun, but your English teacher called. She wants to talk to you, here at home."

"Why?"

"I didn't ask." No, she wouldn't. During Mom's alcoholic days she had always dodged long conversations for fear of blurting out her secret; she never quite got over that habit. "But she said that she didn't want to bother a rabbi's family on the Sabbath, and needed to see you before Monday, so that left today. She's called from her church, so it would be hard to call back and say no."

"All right, I'm coming." Actually I wasn't too upset to cut the ride short; after a week on horseback, my legs and butt were getting tired of their strained positions. "Sorry, Maggie, gotta go."

"But you can come back next week?" From her point of view this was a reconciliation, and hadn't lasted long.

"Sure."

We doubled back to the stable, and I hopped off the horse. Maggie offered to lead it into the stable and unsaddle it. As she took the reins, I wondered how she would react if she knew that that the seemingly second-rate animal had been to another universe and impressed the crap out of everybody there.

-----

The English teacher, who usually wore pants to school, was in an attractive red dress: the Christian equivalent to dressing up for Sabbath. I had just switched to a fresh pair of jeans. Mom had left us alone to talk. "Hello, Grace. Mr. Polk told me about your problem with credits Friday. I tried to get in touch with you, but you had already left."

"Why did you need to talk? In order to gloat?"

"Not at all. I know how it important it is for a high-schooler to graduate with her peers, and how valuable that crucial summer before college is. It wasn't THAT long ago in my own life. So I've come to offer an alternative."

"Oh?" I asked, startled.

"I'd like you to do a term paper in lieu of that missed exam. If you make a B or higher, and don't blow the final exam, you'll have credits you need to graduate in June with everybody else."

Something happened that was very rare in my life: I was filled with joy. It wasn't just escaping the stigma of the missed diploma and the summer school. It was that somebody -- not a pre-programmed Edenworlder, but a normal human being of our world, had gone out of the way to do something nice to me.

"Cool. What will the paper be about?"

"Milton's Paradise Lost -- what's so funny? Have you read it before? Even if you have, that poem usually didn't inspire a lot of laughter."

I got control of my laughter and took a deep breath. "No, I haven't read it. But --- been there, done that."

**THE END**


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